Neverwinter Nights 2 thoughts...

Yeah, it's another game post. I got NWN2 the day after Thanksgiving at Best Buy (a shopping tale in itself), when it was $25 (my price range for a game I don't know much about yet).

It was not fun to install. The install runs ok at first...next thing you need to do is run the updater, and that was taking forever (85MB download, seemed to be going at about 2400 baud). And on top of that, it wouldn't run on my best computer. Which stunk, because I had just gotten a new ATI X1600 video card, expressly because this game was reputed to require it (not quite true, my old 9600 worked, but better is better).

Why wouldn't it run? Is it going to take an Advanced Degree (tm) to figure it out? I was hoping not.

Well, the root cause is that my best machine is Win XP x64 (also it's own tale). I hunted online a bit to find some answers, but that really went nowhere. At first, at startup, I was getting a message about not being able to authenticate the installer DVD, but that was because I had a typo in the security keycode. After I fixed that, at startup it just wouldn't run. No indication of what was wrong other than it would not run. Sent in a complaint to the game support website.

For test purposes, I went back to the old PC (Win2k), installed there, let the updater run (patch 1.02), etc. Well, the game *would* in fact run, albeit slowly. So I played it that way for a couple of weeks. Actual problems encountered are really ones of computer speed rather than anything else (a serious battle overwhelms that machine).

Then I read there was a new patch (1.03), got that installed, no detectable improvements, and a week later I remembered to try it on the x64 box...maybe the startup prob was fixed? Yes indeedy, so now I'm playing on the good machine, as I should be--all the other games I play work just fine on that machine (and with the new vid-card, UT04 can be cranked up pretty high on the visual details).

But there are other problems...NWN 1 had micro map sections, so you did a lot of map-loading. Same for NWN 2, and it is REALLLY slow...Guys, this is a solved problem: look at Dungeon Siege and Morrowind/Oblivion. Solved years ago. Buy their solution and drop this map-loading monkey-biz. Everybody else, too--STOP!

-----

Your teammates/companions are run by Artificial Stupidity. The behavior-control window says "Artificial Intelligence", but it's not. Your teammates generally will run into battle, right when you don't want them to. Usually a battle above their pay-grade. In NWN 1, you'd have to spend a bunch of time preventing your one companion from doing something stupid, so I stoppped using one, except as the occasional decoy. Here, you pretty much have to have a team, most battles can't be won with you by yourself (from Dungeon Siege: "it's easier to take on an army when you are one"). And regularly you are going to have to micro-manage what they do in order to win battles. Gak! Once you accept this, and figure it out [Qara: put all her spells into groups on the quickcast selectors], it's mostly not so hard.

There's a lot more meaning to character dialog-interaction in NWN 2. You can do things that annoy your companions to the point they stop cooperating. Of course, this makes them end of dead often, so that's stupid. Early on I managed to annoy Neeshka enough that she doesn't follow, so now I never take her with me. Bishop is pretty worthless, too, he just argues a lot.

Merchants NEVER have any new stuff. They only have what they started with, and what you sell to them. GUYS! GET A CLUE HERE! In the real world, merchants would have new/different stuff quite often. Oblivion has the same problem. (Dungeon Siege does this right--if you travel far enough that a merchant location pages all the way out, if you return, that merchant has a totally new load; this is great for when you don't see something you want to buy, just leave and come back.) Result: shopping is not that interesting; other online descriptions indicate that if you want better stuff than dropped loot, you have to do weapon/armor crafting. NOT INTERESTED--don't force me to do this.

The game is WAY too much about the dice rolls. GUYS! simplify that down to what it really means for me, I am NOT interested in trying to figure out what a "saving throw" is, or what it means when a weapon has 1d8 damage plus 3 enhancement and 1d6 electrical. Just say 3-11 damage + 1-6 electrical damage, or 4-17. Makes a lot more sense. And if a spell does 1d6 damage per caster level, and I'm looking at a specific caster, tell me the actual number FOR THAT CASTER, because you can know directly what that caster's level is: if caster is level 10, then the damage number is 10-60. Why do you make me work so hard to figure all this out? NOT INTERESTED.

And you cannot know how much health an opponent has left; if you are able to watch the red numbers go by as hits occur, and add them, then when it's dead you have the total. But I want an estimate in advance, so that I know what spells I should cast, or whether an opponent is strong enough to be a problem or ignorable for a while.

specifics (spoilers): Black Garius is not nearly as hard a takedown as you fear. Two previous opponents were harder. Lorne is really tough, I had to use a blastglobe on him; when doing that, you have to keep him in the original blast radius so he can take extra damage while it keeps going off.

-----

Later: I've bailed out on this game. Too many things have bugged me for too long. Got to the point where you have to visit the really old dragon, and then fight the two black dragons. It's close to impossible to get your team to do the right thing here, which is NOT to all rush forward in order to participate in the cut-scene, and then be right in front of where the dragons appear. STAY AWAY ALREADY!

Plus: although this has richer story, it's still pretty dang linear. Oblivion did far better.